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Sunday, May 20, 2012

CLI: 3. Navigating cmd line - cd

The command cd allows switching to, into, or out of a specified work directory.

Consider that cd-ing into something is to enter in a pathname. There are either absolute pathnames (manually-inputted directories) or relative pathnames (facilitated by the use of a period or periods.)

For instance, the directory that holds the applications in Linux is /usr/bin.

- To get there, I cd to it.

*I wrote the absolute pathname.

- Now you are in the directory /usr/bin. But say you wanted to leave the directory back to the home directory. It's simple as writing...

1. cd ../..

*Here I wrote the relative pathname, using double periods (..) to go back a directory and back again.

The / represents the home directory.

or

2. cd

*returns you to default.

- Say you want to go back to the /usr/bin again.

The easiest way to do this is use a relative pathname.

*Notice you could write bin because by writing that cmd, you implied to reach that directory.

- To return to a previous directory (like a backward button on web browsers), we write cd -